Hypertext web search engines track usage patterns of a large base of people (e.g., usage patterns such as keyword searches and the links that are clicked on) to ascertain the relevance or quality of the results (“hits”) for a search query. This surfaces links that are more popular or trending at a particular point in time, and the popular/trending links surface higher as more users click on them. “Surfaces” may be described as identifying with a search query, prioritizing, increasing in importance, etc.
In closed and secure environments, it may be more difficult to surface relevance or quality of documents for questions of similar context, especially if documents are continuously streaming in and the user base is much smaller. This makes it difficult for internal search engines to surface some documents that are more relevant or important to search queries than other documents.
There are citation trackers that are able to track the number of times documents were cited by other publications.